A 6-Year-Old Boy Was Swallowed By A Dune In Indiana And Why It Happened Is Intriguing
By Tori Jane|Published February 26, 2021
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Tori Jane
Author
Tori Jane is a storm chaser, writer, photographer, and the village idiot - in that order. When she's not out and about dancing with the meanest storms on planet Earth for funsies she can be found wandering, shooting landscapes, writing, editing photos, and otherwise up to no good. Legend has it that she can also be occasionally spotted typing up short bios in the third person, but those rumors are unsubstantiated.
If you haven’t heard this story, get ready for a strange roller coaster ride. It’s the story of a once-in-a-lifetime freak occurrence that befell a family when their 6-year-old was swallowed by a dune at Indiana Dunes National Park. At first, it was a mystery: why had this happened? More importantly, how did this happen? Eventually, the answer would be found – and it wasn’t the answer anyone was expecting.
In July 2013, an Illinois family visited the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore for a day of fun in the sand and sun.
Among the family members present was six-year-old Nathan, who, along with some friends, was naturally quite curious. They were spending the day at Mt. Baldy, the largest dune at the park, and Nathan noticed an odd impression in the sand on the flank of the dune. He approached it for a closer look.
To the horror of his friends and family, the child immediately vanished - the sand closed in all around him, and he was buried within seconds.
Digging for him was futile; the more they dug, the more sand filled in the hole into which he had disappeared. Emergency crews arrived and joined in the search for the boy.
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The rescue effort wasn't without hiccups - some of the first responders' vehicles couldn't climb the sandy dune.
Hours passed, and hope waned. The child had fallen into a very, very deep pit - when he was finally found, three hours after the start of his ordeal, he was 11 feet below the surface of the sand.
He spent weeks in the hospital's intensive care unit, including several days on a ventilator, clinging to life. Ultimately, he recovered, and doctors believe he is remarkably lucky; by all means, he should have died, suffocated below the crushing weight of the sand. So, what happened that afternoon? Why had a solid dune given way, and how did the boy it took with it make it out alive?
The park closed pending an investigation. What scientists found was fascinating.
The first group discovered that the strange impressions in the dune that had attracted Nathan's attention in the first place occurred over strange, anomalous gaps beneath the sand. A crew of geologists was called in to investigate from there.
Mt. Baldy, like many dunes at the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, had covered up other dunes over hundreds of years.
An ancient dune uncovered beneath Mt. Baldy had once been peppered with trees, much like other dunes seen at the park today. During wet years (which early 2013 had been), water crept into the decaying wooden trunks and branches of these buried trees of yore, hastening their decomposition process. Eventually, the trees were gone. The result was perfect holes underneath the surface of the dunes where trees had been.
Over time, sand began to creep into these holes, causing the depressions in the surface.
Nathan's body weight was enough to collapse the remainder of the roof to a tree-hole, where he spent three hours as family and rescuers desperately tried to find him. Miraculously, there was a pocket of air that accompanied Nathan beneath the dune - which likely saved his life. Also incredibly, he suffered no brain damage from the time he spent deprived of oxygen.
Park officials made the decision to close Mt. Baldy to the public – there are many more tree-bored holes in ancient dunes beneath its surface, and what happened to Nathan could happen again if folks were able to walk about the dune freely like they were able to before. Today, people can still visit Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, but they can no longer clamber up the largest dune in the park. It’s impossible to forget the time that a six-year-old boy was swallowed by a dune in Indiana, but it was a lesson well-learned with a happy ending as well (thank goodness).
